Where to Find Music for PowerPoint Projects

A complimentary music track can enhance a promotional YouTube video. The right background music for your presentation can turn a minimalist slide show into a striking visual experience. Presentation designers around the world are discovering that affordable, royalty-free music has become a critical component of a successful multi-media production.

But where you ask, does one find appropriate royalty-free music that is free or moderately priced. The following is a list of Web sites where you can find high-quality music tracks for use in your PowerPoint projects. Some are commercial. Others are free. As it is with most things, if you pay for it, you generally get a better product.

Many of these sites have filters so that you can refine your search by mood, length, style, price, composer etc. The commercial sites permit you to download comp versions of the music track. They are similar in nature to digital image comps which are usually of low resolution and which contain a watermark. Digital sound files contain an embedded voice-over which serves to protect the file the way a watermark does on a photographic image.

What file format is best for use with PowerPoint?

Many of these sites give you the option of downloading the file as a WAV file or an MP3. Deciding on the file format largely depends on whether the ultimate size of the PowerPoint file matters. Wave files, those with an extension of .WAV, tend to be larger than MP3 files because they are not compressed. MP3 files are compressed and are significantly smaller in size. They do, however, lose some quality during compression.

WAV files provide CD quality sound and are suitable for small files such as sound effects. If you plan to have music that is played across slides, then MP3 is the way to go.